Dangerous Dreams (A Dreamrunners Society Novel) (13 page)

Chapter 20

Jack inhaled and exhaled, several deep, slow breaths, and then opened his eyes. It was a little after midnight. He’d gotten the pacing out of his system and though he’d had almost no rest, he hoped the passing hours had given Lara a chance to regroup. She’d need every bit of any residual strength she had left if he was going to save her.

He got up out of bed and crossed the room to where he’d dropped his pack when he’d first gotten here. He rifled through it for the small amber bottle he’d brought with him. Inside were three pills, a designer drug with a complex chemical name, but known among runners as Karat, slang inspired by the 24-karat hue of the fields. The drug was manufactured in-house by society labs, and offered only to finders and other agents. It would boost a runner’s already extraordinary abilities, but came with risks, rendering his twin dangerously susceptible to physical harm for the next 48 hours. Jack didn’t even think about the risk. All he thought about was Lara.

One pill was the recommended dose. He tossed back all three and chugged water to get the horse-pill-sized meds to go down.

His body seized. His heart rate and breathing sped up and his vision shuttered down so quickly he was blind within seconds.

What the hell?

Muscles cramping under a fiery assault on the nerves in his arms and legs, he reached out, fumbling for a nearby chair and collapsed into it.

This couldn’t be right. He’d taken Karat only once, and it hadn’t been like this.

Jack
.

Her voice whispered in his mind, laced with anguish and a swirl of bitter emotions he didn’t want to name.

Lara
.

This was happening to Lara, not him. The empathy between them kicked in again. As soon as he realized this, his strange symptoms cleared, the rushed pulse, agonizing fire in his limbs, the shakiness all fading in an instant.

He blinked, could see again, and found a golden string hovering in the air in front of him. He stood up to examine it from another angle and it moved with him. Amazed, he saw the thread of light didn’t just match his movements, it was attached to him. The other end of it started in mid-air, about three feet away and went straight for his chest.

Every dreamrunner, every human for that matter, had his or her own golden thread connecting them to their bodies, but they were wispy, elusive things. No one he knew, no matter how strong a talent, could see his own thread well. Stare at it head on, and it would slip away from sight. Adjust your angle of view, and it jumped away again.

Not this one. Thick and strong, it remained steady. What was it? It couldn’t be his. He wasn’t running, not yet. You only saw them when you were separated from your body and in the fields.

He walked over to the mirrored closet door, hoping to locate where it entered his body,
if
it entered his body. Nothing. It didn’t show up in his reflection. Yet, Jack was certain the golden beam, almost as thick as a rope, anchored itself in his heart.

What is it? Where does it go?

Was this the Karat doing this?

He lifted his hand and cautiously touched the thread with a fingertip.

A shock shot up his arm, and a flash of knowledge splashed in front of his eyes. The place where they held Lara, a windowless cell with a steel bulkhead door, a man in a grey suit standing over her, and next to him another holding a syringe. Her body curled into a fetal position on the cement floor dressed in the type of jumpsuit you would give to a terrorist suspect at Guantanamo Bay. Surrounding her, disordered piles of photographs fell at her feet like leaves. He couldn’t make out what the photographs showed, but they gave off a noxious energy, tainted and calculated. Lara already had or was about to lose consciousness. Jack couldn’t see her captors’ faces, but the sight of the men standing threateningly over her fragile, vulnerable body, sent him into a white-hot rage. It wasn’t bad enough that they’d spent almost three days brutalizing her. They’d just added something worse than physical torture.

Since he’d first seen her, and observed her actively fighting the Greys during her kidnapping, he’d experienced pride in his Lost One. She’d been so strong so far, well beyond anything the Society could expect, even from a trained runner. Now that pride turned to fear. Whatever they’d just done had taken her to a very dark place. Lara was willing herself to die.

No preparatory trance was needed. He wanted into the fields and he made them open to him. Whether Karat or his anger was responsible he couldn’t guess. He only knew that when he thought it he was able to launch himself into that lustrous gloom. The golden cord would lead to Lara. That was its purpose. It joined them. He didn’t know why, only that it did.

True to the fields, however, nothing was so straightforward. The thread knotted freakishly, becoming tangled in each new pathway he found that bore Lara’s signature. If he were meant to save her, why wouldn’t the thread lead him right to her? Instead, it got in the way, confused and misled him. Intuition told him he was already too late, something had irreversibly altered her, but he kept going, kept up the Herculean task along false trails, into and out of dead ends, psychic traps and bottomless pits created by the collective mind of humanity, bleeding its fears, hungers, and most twisted emotions into the fields.

Chapter 21

With an explosion of molten light, a hole in space opened and Jack hurtled into Lara’s cell. His sudden appearance displaced the air molecules around him and sent a shudder through the walls. It was a huge gamble. If her captors hadn’t already expected someone to come after Lara, they might feel the vibrations shaking the building. It couldn’t be helped. For the last hour, he’d sensed Lara’s breathing growing alarmingly slower, shallower, the spark inside her dying. The thread joining them had thinned, become fainter with each passing moment. Jack couldn’t afford to waste precious time on a more stealthy approach.

She lay unconscious on the cement floor, curled up protectively around her injured hand. He had to fight the overwhelming instinct to rush to her side. Years of training kicked in long enough to demand he learn the dangers here first, specifically if anyone else was nearby and armed. He turned toward the door to the cell and halted, frowning.

It was ajar.

Worry hit him at this unforeseen discovery. Why would her abductors leave the door open and their captive unguarded if they were still concerned she might flee?

Gavin’s grim assessment of what it would be like to try extricating a Lost One from the Greys returned to haunt him. What if they’d already turned her? Maybe what he’d sensed was not Lara willing herself to die, but the last part of her humanity slipping away under her abusers’ skilled tactics.

Then another possibility presented itself to him. What if turning her wasn’t the real object here? What if they’d sent her to him at the safe house as bait to lure him back here? They had Taylor, but another trained finder would be worth much more than a clueless Lost One. She may not have known the part she played in their strategy against the Society, and yet was guilty all the same.

Lara’s defenseless, beaten pose on the floor nearly unmanned him. She affected him more deeply than any other person he’d ever met. The way she cradled her mangled hand. Each of her labored breaths. Fragile and delicate, her body was so starved and quiet it seemed as if he was looking at her in running state, not in the flesh. A soft, golden glow caressed her skin, showing him how tentatively she clung to life. Her twin hovered a fraction of an inch above her true body and was no longer securely tied to it. Jack’s noisy entrance should have made her stir, but she remained unnaturally still.

Again, fighting the urgent compulsion to rush to her, he headed for the door to the cell. Reaching it, he peered through the gap, saw no one on the other side and chanced opening it a few inches more.

A typical institutional hallway stretched ahead for approximately twenty yards, dim and smelling of dank cement. It ended in near impenetrable shadow at the foot of a stairwell. Steel doors to other cells lined the corridor. Lara’s cell was the last, hers facing the stairs. Several doors away, another cell stood open and light spilled outward into the hall, indicating a human presence. Inside, two men he couldn’t see argued. Luckily, it appeared they were so engrossed, they either hadn’t noticed the muffled boom of Jack’s arrival, or had attributed it to something else more ordinary. Their words reached him garbled by distance and the walls separating them. Jack could tell, however, that one was in charge, berating the other in tones that threatened more than job security, while the other responded with occasional gulps and spurts of feeble backpedaling. He heard Lara’s last name mentioned once, then again and knew the altercation centered on her.

Should he head out in the corridor, where he could listen in? Just getting a good look at one of the Greys running this operation would be invaluable intel. Their conversation might not be limited to Lara, but also include their plans for the Society or the whereabouts of Taylor and his cell phone. Jack might even be able to get past the open door without being detected, find an exit and thus learn where he’d run.

No. Too risky. You can’t leave Lara
.

When trained as a finder, he’d been cautioned he might have only seconds to extract crucial information from a run. Be observant. Search for the tiniest clue as quickly as you can.

A sign mounted on the wall between Lara’s cell and the one where the men quarreled caught his attention.

WARNING, it read. ANY PERSONS WHO COMMUNICATE UNLAWFULLY WITH INMATES WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Much of the paint had flaked off the sign, making the Penal Code listed in parenthesis below illegible, but he recognized the acronym printed beside the number and the defunct military agency it stood for.

Jack ducked back inside the cell. He hurried to Lara and crouched beside her. Littering the floor around her was the spill of glossy color photographs from his vision. His stomach turned. Bodies. Victims. The vast majority were children. Hundreds of images of carnage. Jack had no idea how these figured into her abuse and indoctrination, but he could well imagine their effect on Lara.

He would slaughter the Greys. Make them pay. He almost turned around for the door again, ready to take on the men down the corridor. Only Lara’s quiet voice stopped him.

“The children,” she murmured.

“Lara?” he whispered. Gently, he took her uninjured hand in his own and gave it a comforting squeeze.

Her eyelids fluttered open. Eyes shimmered with a haze of golden light under their fringe of pale lashes. Woozy, she smiled at him, a smile so bright it almost vanquished the dark circles and tired hollows beneath her cheekbones.

“You,” she said.

Then in an instant, her expression changed. She pulled her hand out of his grasp and scrambled backward, forcing herself up against the wall.

Chapter 22

Lara gave him her hand, and his fit around hers in a gesture that made her feel he’d held it a thousand times before.

But what he did next was so irrational her reflexes balked. He not only dragged her toward the wall of her cell, he ran toward it flat out. She visualized herself colliding with unyielding cement and dug in her heels.

“No!” she said.

Too late. His momentum carried them both relentlessly forward.

They slammed into the wall.

But it wasn’t a wall! A transparent, golden barrier covered her face and stretched so taut it was like diving into a swimming pool covered in melting plastic wrap. She panicked at its smothering embrace. Lara flailed, unable to see anything. She drowned or suffocated or some combination of the two, while at the same time Jack hauled her deeper and deeper into the glowing membrane.

She tried to scream but could draw no oxygen into her lungs. Amazingly, though, she was still able to shout.

“Stop! Don’t!”

With a loud tearing noise they broke through to the other side to air, glorious air.